Pages

Monday, 29 April 2013

“All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us. All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares. And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt. We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength.And fantasy it was, for we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. We courted death in order to call ourselves brave, and hid like thieves from life. We substituted good grammar for intellect; we switched habits to simulate maturity; we rearranged lies and called it truth, seeing in the new pattern of an old idea the Revelation and the World.” -Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

Saturday, 27 April 2013

“Partly why we’re such control freaks is because, when you are going that far, if it’s also crappy and not well done, you look like a shithead,” Parker reasons. “Whether it’s [Book Of Mormon] or an episode of the show, we work really hard to make it structurally sound, have a point. We have to think of a reason why something that’s funny has to be in, so someone can’t say it was gratuitous.”

-Trey ParkerHow much is too much? I'm not sure. I don't have the patience to be subtle. I like repulsive gross shit that makes people uncomfortable. I would rather make someone retch than make someone think. I love that the first thing that comes up when you google me is the Period Pants piece from the Rookie show and not like my ten thousand word thesis. I look that piece because it is sweet and icky and crap and perfect. I have been thinking about Mat Collishaw's work today after Jonathan Jones published a piece on him. I have been thinking about creepy good-bad mega nasty cartoons after my cousins made me watch Salad Fingers on YouTube. "For me, Collishaw is a good political artist for the same reason he is a good religious artist and a good artist-artist. It is because he believes in the efficacy of images. Not for him the abstract evasion, the minimalist half smile – fashionable or not, he wants to punch your imagination in the stomach."

Tuesday, 23 April 2013

"The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flame yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling." — David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Dylan Menges snapped this haunting silhouette left behind when he moved the still-warm corpse of a roadkilled coyote: “She hadn’t been there long and moving her carcass off the road revealed the salty silhouette from passing cars on a winter highway.” Photo credit: Dylan Menges

"I’ve seen other comics use this visual metaphor for depression’s oppression — a sea of black slowly taking over the panels until that’s all that’s left. Hanselmann’s treatment of the idea is distinguished by two factors. First, we get a full page that’s just drawing after drawing of Megg lying in her bed, wide-eyed and supine. If not for the painstaking and lush detail of her hair’s slightly shifting tendrils you might even mistake her immobility for a copy-and-paste job. By waiting this long before the metaphor takes hold, Hanselmann forces us to reckon with the human beneath all that blackness, and it’s riveting.

The second factor is that the blackness has a source: three huge, floating demoniac hag heads, drooling the darkness out of their open mouths. There are times, this suggests, when the pain is so unbelievable that the literally unbelievable makes as much sense as anything else in that moment. In a cycle that’s both vicious and virtuous, this interplay of supernatural-horror imagery and real-life-horror emotion enriches and strengthens the power of both."

"Misery is a vacuum. A space without air, a suffocated dead place, the abode of the miserable. Misery is a tenement block, rooms like battery cages, sit over your own droppings, lie on your own filth. Misery is a no U-turns, no stopping road. Travel down it pushed by those behind, tripped by those in front. Travel down it at furious speed though the days are mummified in lead. It happens so fast once you get started, there’s no anchor from the real world to slow you down, nothing to hold on to. Misery pulls away the brackets of life leaving you to free fall. Whatever your private hell, you’ll find millions like it in Misery. This is the town where everyone’s nightmares come true." — Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

I am a dumb piece of meat and i rot everyday my flesh gives a rotting smell and people say it’s the smell of life and they come to me and watch me rot and get happy and upset and annoyed and disgusted and maybe sometimes feel compassion but they don’t realize they are rotting too.-Daul Kim

As we sat there listening to the carolers, I wanted to tell Brian that it was over now and that everything would be okay. But that was a lie, plus I couldn't speak anyway. I wish there was some way to go back and undo the past. But there wasn't. There was nothing we could do. So I just stayed silent and tried to telepathically communicate how sorry I was about what happened. And I thought of all the grief and suffering and fucked up stuff in the world, and it made me want to escape. I wished with all my heart we could just leave this world behind. Rise like two angels in the night and magically disappear. Mysterious Skin

“Well, you know what grown-ups are,' said Dinah. 'They don't think the same way as we do. I expect when we grow up, we shall think like them - but let's hope we remember what it was like to think in the way children do, and understand the boys and the girls that are growing up when we're men and women.” ―Enid Blyton, The Island of Adventure

Tuesday, 16 April 2013

I've had this photo essay thingymaboo in my draft posts for like a month but have been putting off publishing it coz the most articulate accompanying text I could come up with, the best description of living in the crack between body and self, was this-

Why I never became a male model-A Super Critical Super Detached Essay About My Emotionz